Will Self - My Idea of Fun

There was also Wartberg himself: he set the pattern for all my future employers. His father was a German-Jewish refugee and his mother Welsh, but Wartberg was an aggressive anglophile, given to wearing tweed suits and blathering on about flower growing, law and order, the decline of British standards (he had just obtained one for his best-selling valve), the prohibitive business rate and so on.

I warmed to him instantly. He ran the company as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly found himself on the footplate of a runaway engine. He was constantly dashing from the shop floor to the offices, to his car, to his suppliers, to his customers and back again. He was small, sweaty and effusive with shiny brown hair and eyes. We got on very well together and when after only two months with the company my immediate boss — the marketing manager, a sallow individual with a Solihull whine — suffered a perforated ulcer (I couldn't prevent myself from eidetiking this, the wall of his duodenum like a rusty car door, sharp flakes of oxidised tissue spearing into him), I got his job.

Of course this doesn't cover everything, this simple schema-Bye-bye, Mummy, Whittingtonesque entry to London — wasn't all that was going on, oh no. My therapy with Dr Gyggle had continued and now entered a new phase.

After the deconstruction of my eidetic capability, Gyggle had insisted that I go on seeing him. We had continued with our Thursday-afternoon appointments for the duration of my university career. ‘I wish to build up a more intimate relationship with you, Ian,’ the hairy shrink had told me. ‘I know that you are predisposed to leave things here; I have employed purely technical means to help you rid yourself of something you wish to regard as a technical problem but behind this eidetic delusion we both know there lies an emotional reality. To employ a piece of Freudian jargon, I do not think you will be able to attain full genitality unless we investigate this realm, hmm?’

‘Full genitality?’

‘A successful emotional and sexual relationship.’

‘Oh, oh that.’ Uncanny, the way he pinpointed my preoccupation. For, if there was one aspect of the Fat Controller's legacy that still troubled me severely it was the sex thing. Specifically the grotesque threat that were I to penetrate a woman I would lose my penis.

‘What are you frightened of, Ian?’ He probed me psychologically, whilst laying siege with the battering ram of his biro to the airy battlements of the beard.

I thought to myself: Sit this one out, he'll let it lie. I knew that shrinks were meant to respect the inability of their patients to express certain fundamental anxieties, that the whole thrust of their endeavour was to move around the edifice of such neuroses, gradually excavating their foundations in memory with a sort of verbal teaspoon.

But Gyggle wasn't that kind of shrink; he kept on at me. ‘I know that you've built up some kind of sustaining narrative behind your eidetic delusion — it cannot but be otherwise. You've told me that you spent your adolescence in isolation, actually codifying every little bodily habit and cognitive loop — ‘

‘Yes! And I told you why, because I was frightened of eidetiking myself. What bothers me is what bothers everyone else, nothing special. It's the same common fear that I will fall apart, physically and emotionally, that I will be reduced to a pile of tattered pulp, that I will never be loved by anyone, that I will fail, like. . like — ‘

‘Like your father?’

‘Yeah, like him, the contemptible Essene.’

‘I'm sorry? What did you say?’

‘Oh, nothing, nothing.’

Gyggle also had some good news for me — he was to accompany me to London. He was going back into the National Health Service and had taken a consultancy in a drug dependency unit based at the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs on Hampstead Road.

‘Not that I'm particularly interested in junkies, you understand.’ Gyggle was driving me along the coast road to Brighton as he spoke. He had taken me under his featherless wing to this extent, giving me lifts and sharing with me some of his unusual theories. ‘It's just that these kind of obsessive-compulsive personalities provide me with research fodder. Since no one seems able to do anything with these people they won't mind what I get up to, tee-heel’ He giggled girlishly, as if he were contemplating some impromptu lobotomies, and the beard, which flowed down over the steering wheel, rustled suggestively in the hollow socket of the speedometer. ‘It'll be OK for you to go on seeing me there. I can arrange for you to be an anonymous patient, so that it won't interfere with your prospects at all.’ He turned to me and gave me his habitual smile-implying parting of the beard. I tried to look grateful.

The whole time that I was working at Erith with Wartberg I would journey right across London every Friday afternoon to see Gyggle at his new office. I was grateful. I came to trust Gyggle — and even like him. After all, he had managed to dismantle the magical aspects of my eidesis and now he began to chew away at the very grist of what he termed my ‘delusionary apparatus’.

It took many months more for me to feel safe enough to talk to him about The Fat Controller, but there came a time, when the memory of our last vertiginous encounter had dimmed, that I became prepared to risk it. Gyggle was, of course, entranced. I knew that for him The Fat Controller confirmed it — I was his Wolf Man, his Anna O. He told me as much.

‘If it weren't so entirely destructive of your recovery, Ian, I would love to publish,’ he said to me. ‘For I don't think any clinician has ever had the privilege of witnessing such a complex example of hysteria. This man, Mr Broadhurst, who you transformed into your “Fat Controller”, your personified id, you understand now what he really was?’

‘Well, if I accept your hypothesis that all my subsequent experiences were hysterical embellishments, I suppose he was just a mild eccentric, an ordinary seaside retiree.’

‘Of course, he's probably dead by now.’

‘Oh I doubt that. ‘

‘Why? Why do you doubt it?’

There was the rub. I doubted it because whatever the efficacy of Dr Gyggle's treatment and however convincing his explanation of how a lonely and fucked-up boy built up a delusion both to compensate for the lack of a father and punish himself for his own Oedipal crime, I still couldn't convince myself that I was entirely rid of my mage.

He continued to dog me. He was a black penumbra in the corner of my visual field, a shadow that chased the sunlight, the very chiaroscuro of the commonplace. Sometimes, sitting eating a sandwich on a park bench or jolting on the top deck of a bus through South London, I would hear his voice echo through my inscape. His jolly, fat man's voice, expansive and chilling. My inability to unbelieve in him hung on to me by the jaws, as I ascended the corporate ladder.

When I tired of writing press releases on new lube concepts I left Wartberg's valve business to go to the Angstrom Corporation, where I worked on the launch of a new biscuit, the Pink Finger. After three years there I was head-hunted by a marketing agency, D. F. & L. Associates, which was based just north of the City. Here I took up a position with the grand title of ‘Consultant’. My job was to prepare the groundwork for a revolutionary new financial product.

In seven years I had as many new cars, each one more highly powered and larger than the last. I became a wearer of double-breasted suits, a leaner on bars, a discusser of interest rates. All to some avail, for I now sank gratefully into my own assembly life line, sank into the forgetfulness of my own habitual patterns.

At Easter and Christmas I still went home to Cliff Top. Mummy had retired from the hotel business. She had made enough money to maintain Cliff Top as the substantial manor house it had become. No matter that it was an ersatz creation — Queen Anne impregnated by Prince Charles — she believed in her haute credentials. And although I had disappointed her by going into ‘trade’, I was still the son of the house. As we sat drinking sherry together and I watched her acquire the jowled ovine features of all elderly English gentlewomen, I found it hard to summon up myoid anger. I even found it difficult to believe that she had ever been in cahoots with Mr Broadhurst.